Panel Discussion: Distributed Performance
Alexander Carôt (Hochschule Anhalt), session chair
Saturday, Nov. 19, 4:00pm, CalIT2 Auditorium
4:00. Introduction
4:05. David Willyard, MusicianLink
MusicianLink is dedicated to providing musicians with tools to facilitate truly real-time Internet music collaboration and performance. Its first product is the jamLink: a high-quality, ultra-low latency Internet audio streaming appliance designed for professional musicians and students alike. JamLink sessions utilize peer-to-peer streaming of uncompressed PCM audio and are facilitated by the MusicianLink.com session management system to ensure easy and consistent interconnectivity among collaborating musicians. To date this technology has been well received by jamLink users around the world, and has become for many an essential means for rehearsal, lessons, and other types of musical collaboration. The company is now focused on further extending this technology to enable more consistent and higher quality musical experiences for musicians in diverse and unpredictable network conditions.
4:25. Dr. Alain Renaud, Bournemouth University, UK
Dr. Alain Renaud is a lecturer in Music Technology at Bournemouth University, UK. He has been involved in the development and implementation of NMP systems for many years, especially with transatlantic connections and the corresponding high latencies. He will discuss various strategies to deal with latencies beyond the general acceptance threshold of approximately 25ms.
4:45. Manfred Rürup and Karl Steinberg, DigitalMusician (via telepresence)
Manfred Rürup (CEO) and Karl Steinberg (CTO) are the founders of Digitalmusician.net, which is a community that supports online collaboration with musicians, producers and recording engineers from around the world. It currently has about 35.000 registered users. Digitalmusician.net enables up to 3 users to connect with each other via a peer-to-peer connection over the Internet. It includes a video chat, a talkback and the possibility to record the performance of any artist abroad in a wav-audio format up to 24bit/96KHz. In other words, it is a virtual recording studio situation, not a jam session, as only 1 artist will be recorded at a time. The Internet delay will be compensated through a set-off time of the recording unit. At the AES panel they will talk about their experience with this technology in terms of copyright problems, artistic motivation, user behavior and general perspectives or issues.
5:05. Synthia Payne, University of Denver
Synthia Payne's purpose is to produce, design, and implement multiplayer online live arts collaborations. She is sometimes referred to as a power user who has produced and/or performed online and/or onsite at CU Boulder, NYU, Stanford-CCRMA, at large, and sometimes anonymously using jackTrip, jamLink, ejamming, SoundJack, netpd, and NINJAM. Synthia is also the designer of musical interfaces like SONICArray, and a massively multiplayer online arts playground called CYBERJAMMER ripe for program development.
The main challenge to building and utilizing networking techniques is that each location must have a coordinated system or systems and have had some preparation with the equipment and participant locations. Without this preparation it can be an exercise in frustration and failure. With NINJAM in particular, there is potential in applying different rules to making music. It throws people off because they cannot play a song everyone knows. It's a dealbreaker for most but for others a fresh approach.
5:25. Q&A
5:45. End of session
